adventures in acting & stand-up

TwitterQuest Begins!

Well! What a day I’ve been having!

After Launching TwitterQuest (see the post before last, or click on https://richardrycroft.net/2010/12/28/twitterquest/), I managed, during those quiet days leading up to and just after the New Year, to attract a few extra followers (or, as I prefer to think of them, Silent Witnesses), thanks to friends doing a tweet or two on my behalf. Notably @DavidTurners (one of the guys behind the JoyPod podcast for gamers – more info at http://spong.com/joypod) and @davebromage (funny comedian and journalist, who has a blog here on WordPress, at https://davebromage.wordpress.com/). Many others tweeted too, including the comedians @joselby (http://www.joselby.com/), @ashleyfrieze (http://www.incredible.org.uk/), @stuchopslaws (http://stuchopslaws.wordpress.com/ as you probably know by now) and @philiphiggins (who doesn’t seem to have a website. Good Heavens. Odd chap). I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who’s joined in so far. Sorry if I haven’t mentioned you this time.

It was Dave Bromage whose tweet reached the attention of @VirginRacing, the official F1 Virgin Racing team (http://www.virginracing.com/). I switched off the machine last night, pretty pleased with my total of 136 followers. When I returned to it this morning, there were over 100 notifications in my email inbox, of new followers as a direct result of Virgin Racing tweeting about the cause to its almost 29,000 followers. But it didn’t end there. Followers retweeted and more came. And then the folks from Viz got involved.

With almost 67,000 followers, @VizTopTips (http://www.viz.co.uk/) must be one of the most retweeted Twitter users in the UK (and abroad, as it now appears), so I thought I’d let them know what I was up to. I thought the pointlessness of the challenge might appeal to them. I was right. Within half an hour of my email, they had very kindly told the world about me, and the new follower notifications flooded in! At the time of writing, I now have 547 followers.

By the way, there’s absolutely no commercial side to my TwitterQuest. I’m just acknowledging people who have joined in the fun, that’s all.

Here are some of my favourite comments which have been generated on Twitter today:

If you’d like an extra follower, follow @richardrycroft, who is aiming to be the most followed person never to have tweeted. Thank you 🙂 (@VirginRacing)

Now following @richardrycroft as amused by his anti-celeb anti-Klout approach to Twitter. (@TMT_Lawyer)

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FOLLOW @richardrycroft who provides a restful silence in the often noisy Twittersphere. (@VizTopTips)

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@richardrycroft Nice one Richard, hope it catches on! No need to reply to this message or re-tweet. (@David_Joseph)

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@richardrycroft But I bet every morning you wake up in a sweat and check Twitter to see who’s following/unfollowing 🙂 (@OnewordTF)

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Postmodern tweeters: @richardrycroft and @big_ben_clock(@CarkeysCoUK – and you might be interested to learn that @Big_ben_clock tweets the appropriate number of “BONG”s on the hour, every hour, to more than 78,000 followers. He / she / it doesn’t appear to follow anyone at all, but that didn’t stop me from signing up, and I would urge you to do the same!)

I refuse to follow @richardrycroft unless he gets ‘verified’. Otherwise, how do I know it’s him & not a scam to steal my personal identity? (@sexteta, who later followed me anyway. Maybe he looked at this blog thing and was reassured? Or perhaps it was a computer-savvy person’s joke that I didn’t understand?)

I love the idea that some people have started challenging one another to get a tweet out of me! In fact, I urge any tweeters reading this to consider adding something like “what would @richardrycroft say about this?” if you have characters to spare at the end of a tweet.

As promised, everyone who follows me is being followed back, or sent a ‘follow request’, depending on their security settings. On a day like today, that takes quite a while (and some days I don’t see my email at all – I don’t carry the internet on a phone in case it gets scratched, remember), so if I haven’t followed you within a few hours, please be assured that I shall. Curiously, while I get email notification about the vast majority of new followers, some slip through the net, so I do check the whole list from time to time as well. If you think I might have overlooked you, please leave a comment here, or contact me through Twitter. If you don’t want me to follow you, just ignore or delete me from that list, but PLEASE keep following me.

ps Just as I was about to publish this, both @VirginRacing and @DavidTurners tweeted about me again (thank you!) and brought another flurry of activity into the Rycroft home. As this goes to press, I can claim a TwitterQuest total of 642 and rising. One of the latest additions to the Silent Witnesses even tweeted this: